My next two reviews discuss a couple of very interesting
documentary films. As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am not a frequent reviewer of non-fiction movies. For whatever reason, I’m not particularly drawn to them most of the time. Occasionally, however, my interest gets piqued, and I find myself rewarded. Which brings me to these two pictures. While they are unrelated to one another and very different in style, tone and most everything else, what they have in common is excellence. Three
Identical Strangers is the incredible story of triplets separated at
birth; and it is in theaters now. New
and currently available streaming on demand from HBO and HBO Now is Robin
Williams: Come Inside My Mind - a biopic about the brilliant beloved
comedian and actor who died in 2014. I highly recommend both of these films.
The Robin Williams biopic will be the subject of my next
post. Here, let’s talk about Three Identical Strangers.
There is no other way to say it: Three Identical Strangers
tells a remarkable story. “I wouldn’t
believe it myself if it didn’t actually happen to me,” says one of the
protagonists. A funny, joyous human interest story at first, it quickly becomes
a moving family drama and a detective story that also raises some deep and troubling
ethical and moral issues, and ultimately a poignant contemplation of one of psychology’s
great unanswered questions. It is one of those rare documentaries that deserves
a “Wow!” rating.
The film starts with Robert Shafron describing how, as a
19-year old freshman arriving for the first time on campus at Sullivan
Community College (in the Catskills, about a hundred miles from Manhattan), he
kept meeting people who acted like they knew him, like they were welcoming back
an old friend. To say he was nonplussed would be an understatement.
[Before
I go further, let me say that all of this stuff happens very early in the movie and in no way will spoil anything for you.
It’s just the set-up, included in pretty much all the ads for and most of the
reviews of Three Identical Strangers.]
Eventually, he meets a guy, Michael Domnitz, who sees Robert
as a doppelgänger for a good friend of his,
Eddy Galland. Eddy had attended Sullivan the previous year but was not expected
back. Michael asks a few questions and quickly guesses what this might mean. He
drives Robert to Eddy’s home and the two set eyes on one another for the first
time. Even as this initial meeting is recounted years later, the astonishment
and the emotional rush of this moment for these two young guys comes across
thrillingly. Can you even imagine what it would feel like to meet someone and
discover, out of the blue, that it’s your identical twin?
They exchange histories – born the same day, same hospital,
adopted with no knowledge of the existence of a biological sibling, much less a
twin. Their parents were also shocked – for they had not been told either. I
mean, that’s quite a tale! So much so that the press picked up on it as a
charming, human interest story. Which is how 19-year-old David Kellman, reading
the newspaper one morning, happened on a photograph of himself – doubled – in
an article about these twins who were separated at birth. He knew he had also
been adopted, but … OMG!
One of the reasons that I rarely review documentaries is
that I find quite a lot of them uninspired and, frankly, rather dull. This is
despite the obvious fact that most docs are about interesting or at least
potentially interesting topics. (Why else would anyone go to the trouble of
making them?) The problem, for me, is that many non-fiction filmmakers seem to
believe that simply getting information on screen is enough; and/or they don’t
know how to tell a story that engages and perhaps even entertains us along the
way. Sometimes, the story itself is so interesting or inspiring that we can
overlook the director’s pedestrian craftsmanship – as for example in the case
of Searching
for Sugar Man, which managed
to garner the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2013, despite such
shortcomings. But more often, the appeal of a good story is lost due to poorly
organized, unfocussed and/or uninspired filmmaking. To a significant degree,
this is the case with the new film Playing
God, for example, a rather dull profile of the truly remarkable
Ken Feinberg, the disaster czar who administered the victim compensation
process following such disasters as 9/11, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill,
and the Sandy Hook shooting, among other events.
By contrast, Three Identical Strangers is not
only an amazing story, it is a well-told one, crafted to play much like a
fiction film, to engage us in such a way as to enhance the drama, the mystery,
and our intellectual and emotional experience. It unfolds, like most pictures, in three acts.
First, we have Robert, Eddy and David discovering one another – an encounter so
exhilarating that for the remainder of the film we are suffused with a warm
solicitude for them. In the second act, there’s the thrill of Instant celebrity
– appearances on every imaginable talkshow, etc. - and its aftermath. We get to
know these guys as a team and as individuals, learn more about their respective
backgrounds, meet their families, learn a little about the significant adjustments
each had to go through to accommodate radically revised life circumstances and,
as life is never just a bowl of cherries, something about the dark side as
well. In act three, we face the dark mystery of how all this could have
happened.
The filmmaker, Tim Wardle, incorporates multiple strategies in
telling this story: there are narratives by the triplets themselves, both in
interview format and voiceover; commentary by friends, family members, wives,
investigators and other interviewees; clips from TV talk shows on which they
appeared, as well as home movies documenting weddings and other family
gatherings; and some reenactments tastefully interspersed to flesh out the
narratives provided by Robert, Eddy, David and others.
I am not going to reveal why or by who these identical
triplets were separated at birth; other than to say that these questions are intriguingly
explored in the latter part of the film, that the questions thus raised are
troubling yet fascinating, and that much mystery remains to this day. I will
say that I came out of the film feeling exhilarated - having been stimulated
emotionally, morally, and intellectually all at once. You may have a similar
reaction – which, after all, is the ultimate cinema experience.
1 hour 36 minutes Rated PG-13
Grade: A - WOW!
Now
playing in select theaters n
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